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Current State

API tooling is still under construction and currently lives in the PDE incubator project. This guide is intended to be an example of how we intend developers to use API tooling rather than how it is used today. Some form of the tooling will be avilable in Eclipse 3.4, starting with the M5 milestone build.

API tooling bundles (plug-ins) are not avialable as binary downloads. You have to build the plug-ins yourself if you want to use them. See Getting the Source Code for help on getting and building the bundles.

API Tooling Setup

API tooling provides a builder that reports API usage and binary compatibility errors in the workspace. You must configure bundles that you want API tooling to report errors on and you must define an API profile that can be used as an API baseline (i.e. workspace projects are compared to the baseline in order to report binary compatibility errors, missing @since tags, incorrect version numbers, etc.).

Define an API Baseline

An API baseline defines the state you want to compare your development workspace bundles against for the purposes of binary compatibility, bundle version numbers, and @since tags. For example, if you are developing bundles for Eclipse 3.4, you will use Eclipse 3.3 as your baseline.

API profiles are managed on the Plug-in Development > API Profiles preference page. Here you can create, edit, and delete API profiles. You can select one profile as the 'default' profile - this is the profile that will be used as the baseline.